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KingofGnG writes "Disney has chosen the San Diego Comic-Con International to present its new sci-fi project: the sequel to Tron. The classic movie from 1982 dealt with video games, virtual reality and 3D graphics when none of those things were widely popular. The new movie has got an official title and synopsis now, and they've released the very first trailer from the movie (this time without silly censorship) together with some concept art and the teaser poster." No matter how silly the movie is, they'll at least get my money for sheer nostalgia.

Seriously....I had an entire >cassette [wikipedia.org] with songs about videogames around that time; it was Buckner and Garcia's "Pacman Fever" - and in addition to Pac Man it had songs about Centipede, Defender, and many others.

So I think by the time a campy album has been released, based on the smash success of a novelty single, that video games were indeed popular.

They weren't 3D (well, not really, I supposed you could say that Tempest was 3D in a way), but there was Intellivision, Atari, and awesome Apple ][ games t

Wait. Wait, wait, what? We're just going to let this pass unremarked? What the fuck does that mean? What bizarre creation myth did your parents tell you led to your existence? I cannot think of any rational way this is a metaphor for meeting and/or fucking your future wife.

I remember a 3D maze game in the early 80's for the TRS-80. It was a frustrating game that I never won because my torch always ran out. There was an extra torch in a one room, but as soon as you entered the wall closed in behind you and you couldn't get out. I never did solve it, and I haven't been able to find it or even the name of it since so that I can go back to it. But it was my first introduction to the 3D maze/adventure games, and I loved it. It took Dungeon Master for the Atari ST before I found another 3D Maze/Adventure game that I liked.

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

well, I wouldn't call it 3D...you couldn't see things from different perspectives (the ground continuously moves in a single direction, rather than you moving around the terrain at will). Basically, it was a side-scroller or top-scroller from a rear 3/4 view.

There were some pretty good 3D games in 1982, but they were vector-based. Battlezone (a tank game), Red Baron (a dogfight game), and Tempest (too bizarre to describe) were all out in 1980/81, the wonderful Star Wars arcade game came out in 1982 IIRC. There were others as well, but these were the "biggies".

Not even close. Wolfenstein wasn't even the first raycaster game. It was preceded by Catacombs 3D (also by Id) which itself was preceded by Hovertank (also by Id).

Before those were even a twinkle in Carmack's eye, we had MIDI Maze (1987) and Star Wars Arcade (1983), just to name a few. There were tons of attempts at 3D games before Carmack. He merely popularized the First Person Shooter genre and made 3D Graphics the standard.

He didn't "merely popularize" them in the sense of using star power or deep pockets to get people hooked (since he had neither). Rather, he made 3d (or 3d-ish) games that could run well and look good (better than the competition) on PC-compatible hardware in the pre-acceleration days. This brought 3d to critical mass where it was worth developing 3d acceleration products for the masses. You could look at any of the previous innovators in 3d gaming, including all the ones you mentioned, and say they merely did this or that, since there was no single breakthrough that defined gaming as we know it. But his contribution - his technical contribution - was larger than most.

For Technical contributions Honorable Mention should be given to Ken Silverman:
Walkan, Ken's Labyrinth, Build Engine for Duke Nukem 3d, etc
Ken was a brilliant young programmer who we all love but never knew. You rock Ken!

Do not give Disney your money, they will only use it to steal your culture

Before you mod Plunky's post all the way to -1, consider that The Walt Disney Company was one of the two biggest advocates of the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (the other being the Gershwin estate).

When you create something under copyright, you are making a contract with the government; the government establishes your legal right to control copying of that work (and the profits thereof) for a specified period of time, during which the government will enforce penalties for infringement of your copyright, after which the work becomes freely available to all. You agreed to that contract when you filed the copyright. Now you come back, seventy years later, and claim that -- even though you already agreed that your work would fall into the public domain five years from now -- you deserve to have the terms of that contract changed, and should be allowed to continue to profit from and control distribution of that work. You already got the term of protection you agreed to, and you're arguing that you shouldn't have to be required to carry out your end of the agreement.

Yes, Disney still makes money off Mickey Mouse, both as copyrighted cartoons and as a trademark. However, the work "Steamboat Willie" was created and copyrighted for a specific period of time, which would have by now expired, making the cartoon public domain. Disney went back to Congress and lobbied successfully to get the term of copyright changed retroactively. And that is what the "huge issue" is. I don't think that people would have had a problem with the Copyright Term Extension Act if its effect were to amend the term of copyright so that any copyrights granted after it took effect had a longer term. What is objectionable about the Act is that it went back and changed the terms of copyrights that already existed -- and I fully expect Disney to keep going back, as the extended copyrights come up on expiration, to go back to Congress again and again, attempting to keep control of their creations in perpetuity, rather than being required to comply with their obligation to release them into the public domain.

In 1998 the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended copyright protection to the duration of the author's life plus seventy years for general copyrights and to ninety-five years for works made for hire.

They have arranged to withold Tron from the public domain for an extra 20 years.

Disney doesn't steal your culture, they just copyright it, then charge you money to use your own culture. I've always contended that both Disney and Microsoft use the same business model: steal intellectual property from others, then vigorously defend it as their own. That being said, I still use XP, and I will be taking my daughter to The Frog Princess as soon as it comes out. Sigh...

No matter how silly the movie is they'll at least get my money for sheer nostalgia.

Do not give Disney your money, they will only use it to steal your culture

Not only that, but it's that sort of sentiment that encourages publishers to just churn out cheap crap on an established universe rather than make something that lives up to, and even surpasses the original.

I refuse to see any revivals that aren't at least as good as the original.

I see the other 10% of their revenue coming from the new game "LightCycles 3D"Which I sadly will probably buy a copy of.

I'm just happy that someone seems to have made an actual Space Paranoids [tron-sector.com] game! *That* was the game I always wanted to play as a kid, not that thing they came out with at the arcades. Apparently at a recent promotional event for the new movie, someone set up a "Flynn's" arcade, put a bunch of 80s arcade games in it, and included this game in an arcade cabinet. Sweet.

Along with "War Games" TRON gave an unrealistic expectation of what computers could do which continues to perplex Ludites to this day.

On an offtopic note, this reminds me of one time when I went to a school auction. A couple of idiots felt that they got a really good deal, because they got the largest piece of computing equipment (A DEC computer of some sort) for less than what the Commodore PET computers were going for. I couldn't help but smile when I heard one say to the other "This part's the brains."

They'll have an unrealistic expectation of any expression of technology, by definition. All the while War Games and Tron were inspiring a whole generation (myself included) to learn what it's all about. We knew very well the expectations in both movies were unrealistic, but that was never the point. I had no hope of making my Sinclair ZX81 do anything remotely close to what Tron showed me but I got to fell like Flynn when I hacked a reset button for it (pin 13 to ground on the Z80). (Good) sci-fi is about inspiration, not reality. If it were realistic it would be a documentary and in 1982 a very boring one...

Don't EVEN compared Wargames to Tron! Yes, there were a some exaggerated elements to Wargames, but on the whole it was remarkably accurate in portraying hacker culture and the tricks of the hacker/phreaker trade (so powerful that it even inspired the popular terms "War-dialing," and later "War-driving," among phreakers). Tron, by contrast, was nothing but pure fantasy--a flimsy excuse of a plot designed to service some whiz-bang new CGI.

I see you've been modded down to -1, so there's no that much point in responding, but I might as well: Yes there was. It contained a mix of practical and CGI effects. Certainly more CGI than in any prior film. The light cycles (partially), tanks, ships, landscapes... most were computer generated.

Thinking a bit more about this, perhaps the best counter example of this was "Short Circuit" where they explained that "They don't get happy, they don't get sad, they don't get angry, THEY JUST RUN PROGRAMS".

I really enjoyed the PC game Tron 2.0, put out by Monolith a few years back. It's actually quite clever (some good jokes, and of course the Musak version of the Tron theme plays in "the real world"), and the graphical style makes it almost timeless: it doesn't require high poly count video cards, it's all about that Tron look. The negatives, of course, were that most of the weapons past the disc were superfluous, and the multiplayer lightcycle races grew tiresome after a few rounds. It also had Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan providing voice talent.

I'm excited about a new film, but I'm also torn about what this might do to the story. Still, it's nice to see an interesting IP still has some life in it.

I couldn't possibly care less about a Tron sequel. The original was enjoyable when you were a kid, but watching it as an adult, you just realize what boring and uninteresting crap it is. It isn't even watchable in stretches longer than about fifteen minutes. So anyone who has finally realized what crap it is won't care about a sequel and kids today who are the age that we were when we liked the first one won't care because they weren't around for the first one.

I could almost understand a remake and doing it right this time. But a sequel suggests that they thought the original was actually good. The only people who will care about this are those who are suffering a heavy bout of nostalgia and haven't watched it recently so still mistakenly believe it's AWESOME.

It's like Knight Rider. I'm sure a lot of us remember how cool Knight Rider was when we were kids. Then watched a couple episodes as adults and realized how stupid and terrible and uninteresting it is.

Instead of this shameless money-grab, they should... you know... do something new.

Even when I was a kid, Tron was interesting only because of the computer graphics. It was an "eh" film, but it made use of cool new technology. I have watched it after becoming an adult, and was surprised to find I enjoyed it more. Not only due to nostalgia, but I actually understood the interplay between the adult characters in the real world this time, and I finally got all of the computer puns.

But, but, but... we are Generation X, long forgotten in between the baby boomers and their annoying offspring, the GenY'ers. Now that the old fogeys are retiring it is our turn in charge, and we are going to create nostalgia for our youth era gone by. No longer do we have to relive the 1960s and 1970s... nooooo, that is only for the baby boomers. Now instead we get to relive bad hair, metal, band-aid, the dawn of personal computing and video games. We get to recreate Atari 2600 games and make them into movies. We get to mandate any new pop stars create hits "remaking" the hits of our generation... hopefully we'll do better than Phil Collins did with that Supremes remake. This way we'll get to like the current popular music. And g'damn it you are going to sit through it and like it. Maybe in time you too will get sick of it and create your own grunge movement. Rap doesn't count.

To all those GenY'ers who might complain, I say you guys have nothing to bitch about for quite some time. We GenX'ers after all have sat through countless replays of Beatles and Mama's and Papa's songs on the radio, umpteen recollections of what a tragedy it was when losing John Lennon, television show after show on JFK Jr., and that god-awful mess that "the Cuba crisis" was about. About the time you have listened to Nirvana's Teen Spirit for the 10,000th time, and have your own stars go tits up (and I mean beyond that dude who played the Joker in Batman) like Kurt Cobain, well then you can complain.

I couldn't possibly care less about a Tron sequel. The original was enjoyable when you were a kid, but watching it as an adult, you just realize what boring and uninteresting crap it is. It isn't even watchable in stretches longer than about fifteen minutes.

I feel that away about a lof of things I used to watch. The old Transformers cartoon, Knight Rider, even some films.. Back when I was a kid these shows were awesome and now I have to stop after just a few mi

What's wrong with re-using a Universe? It saves time doing exposition and background, and let's you frame a new story in a familiar setting.

Admittedly, sometimes it works (Hobbit->LoTR, SW->ESB->RotJ, Discworld, Dune->DM->CoD) and sometimes it doesn't (SW ep IV-VI -> SW I-III, Matrix->Matrix R/R). If the storytelling is any good, the setting is just secondary.

I noticed that too... They've taken a few liberties but overall I'm happy to see that they've mostly kept with the original look and feel. It looks incredible while still being true to the unique Tron environment. It's nice to see what you can do now versus then. The lighting on the suits isn't as blown out and the reflections are awesome.

That's not true. They only left straight walls behind, yes. Once they escaped from the game grid, they did all sorts of chicanes and s-curves when fleeing the army of Flynn's tank programs he'd created before he left Encom. They even "slid" sideways.

They still got it wrong. Choose: free movement OR wall-trails, not both at once.

Lightcycles could navigate curves in the original movie, and were clearly shown doing so during their escape from the game grid. When I get home tonight I'll pop the DVD in and give you a timestamp to look for.

1) Qubit - flies around saying, "Yes", "no", and "maybe"2) Tron-troll - Any scene involving communication between more than two characters is constantly interrupted by the local Tron-troll3) Anonymous - suddenly hordes of identical looking drones appear to aid the main character in his/her quest then dissipate feeling good about themselves4) Users - rather than only having sparse information about the users, characters in Tron know everything about the users and are constantly interrupted by the user's incessant communications about what they are currently doing or their asking Tron characters to fill out quizzes which have nothing to do with the plot of the movie5) DRM - weapons, vehicles, and entire structures suddenly stop working at the whim of the MCP

By coincidence, last weekend I saw TRON in its entirety on YouTube. I must confess that it's a great movie. Obviously, technically, nobody knew what the hell they were talking about and it shows. Still, it was a great, prophetic movie. Well worth catching in 10 parts, each 10 minutes long...

Still, it was a great, prophetic movie. Yeah, 'cause in real life, people really do get sucked into their computers all of the time... I'm sorry, it had a pathetic plotline, bad acting, and terrible graphics. Aside from semi-cool light cycles (which were only put in to leverage a computer game spinoff as far as I can tell) there is really nothing to like about the movie.

Premise: The MCP is sold to a young kid at an electronics fair. Playing a game of chess the MCP (fitting on an old tape reel) the MCP says he can improve the game if the young boy, Inserts a disk from another program. After a few minutes the graphics improve in the game.

A short interlude of the boy progressively adding new disks and features as the MCP grows more complex. Then he finally plugs it in to the Internet...

10 years later.

The young boy, now a leader in industry running a CPU manufacture seals the

Back when video games were a fairly new thing and CGI was amazing they made Tron. The visual style was impressive, especially given the use of hand tinting and other post processing effects. These days it's all too easy using CGI and other computer gadgetry.

There simply isn't any way that this sequel can stand out compared to all the other CGI fx laden films around. Unless of course they go for rotoscoping or similar as used in A Scanner Darkly.

Here's a bit of odd trivia. The original Tron movie was created (in part) on a clone of the Digital PDP-10 computer. The PDP-10 includes an instruction called TRON (Test Right-halfword Ones and skip if Not masked). The opcode in octal (which is the convention on the PDP-10) is 666.

I doubt Disney will actively publicize this.

(I still fondly remember working for years with this odd but elegant 36-bit machine.)

I'm excited as hell for this movie, but I wish they brought back David Warner as Sark. You might say he's too old, but I've seen him in something recently and he still looks good. He's truly an underrated actor and makes a great villain.